A global experiment in Roam co-living

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Update: I decided to leave this company and am no longer affiliated with Roam Co-Living.

I’m moving into a columnist role at TechCrunch and onto some new projects. One is called Roam Co-Living. It adaptively reuses space for communal living and location independent workers in other parts of the U.S. and world, starting in Miami and Indonesia.

Although this work will mostly be outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ll still weigh in and write occasionally on tech, political and local land-use issues as a columnist.

There are several motivations behind this:

The Bay Area’s governance, land-use and taxation issues

Kim-Mai CutlerContributor

Kim-Mai Cutler is an operating partner for Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture firm and was previously a journalist covering technology, finance and policy issues at TechCrunch -- best-known for her long-form work on the Bay Area.

Nomadic living

The second part is about the way that I’ve lived my life for most of the last 10 years. A decade ago, I stepped off a plane and lived abroad for the very first time. I was working as a financial journalist in Buenos Aires, interviewing everyone from cattle traders to stock brokers to retail business owners. Then I spent the next year living everywhere from sharing a single room with nine Vietnamese young women in an outer district of Hanoi for several months before moving into Spanish Harlem.

It completely changed my perspective. I haven’t had a conventional office job in years.

Even though a lot of my work is associated with California, I spent about one-third of every year overseas and I’ve lived this way for most of the last decade. I wake up in entirely new places many days of the year, sometimes in rural Western China and sometimes on the Rwandan-Democratic Republic of Congo border. Having a conversation with someone completely different from you, whether that’s a young and ambitious Beijing entrepreneur or a Naxi farmer on the other side of China, is humbling. It’s a visceral reminder of all the myriad ways that people can live and how societies can be structured.

Over the years, I’ve also become very familiar with some of the problem areas of this particular lifestyle, from managing time zone differences to unexpectedly not having reliable wi-fi or power to just being alone and on the road a lot.

While this emerging location independent lifestyle has some people calling themselves “digital nomads,” I’m reluctant about that term. For me, that term feels like it implies a lack of responsibility to places and communities because of its transience. In this work, I’m actively trying to get to know people who’ve been in communities for decades or years and have built institutions in them.

Back in the Bay Area, I often get the question from longstanding locals about why young people don’t move elsewhere.

First of all, they do. But second of all, the pressures that cities like San Francisco or Oakland face are pretty universal and I’ve seen them everywhere from London to Portland to New Orleans to Southeast Asia and even in very particular neighborhoods in Detroit. The global population is both growing and urbanizing, and managing infrastructure and workforce development is profoundly difficult everywhere.

I’m hoping to do a book at some point when I have time on all of this, and this comparative work will inform that.

Promoting new housing, architecture structures for communal living

The final part is the community living aspect. I grew up in a California suburb in a tract home built in 1967, when the state was in its high-growth years. Many of the region’s fruit orchards were quickly turned over into tracts of single-family detached housing.

I believe part of the reason that cities have come back into vogue is because they provide a kind of built environment that works for people who aren’t in nuclear families but are still seeking community.

Changing this to provide alternatives is not as easy as it seems. The problem with building so-called “co-living” properties is that there just isn’t a lot of inventory, especially in places with high-land values like San Francisco. This is why many attempts at “co-living” either come out expensive relative to the local market or involve aggressive subdividing or overcrowding with bunkbeds.

If you’re interested in being part of this experiment in Bali, Indonesia or joining the founding community in Miami starting in May, drop us a line. Maybe you’ve been working or living somewhere, and you want to try something totally new or just get away. Let us know.